Stop Calling it Artificial Intelligence

Good user-experience design is all about setting proper expectations then meeting or exceeding them. When designing an interface that promises a taste of “artificial intelligence,” we’re basically screwed from the get-go. I’m convinced that a big reason why the average person is uncomfortable with, or unsatisfied by applications that tout themselves as artificially intelligent has to do with the fact that no one is quite sure what the phrase even means. Lately, in the tech world, “artificial intelligence” or “A.I” has become a shorthand for any system that uses a neural network – a pattern recognition system loosely inspired by the signal processing that goes on in the human brain. Simple neural networks don’t do much more than analyze things and sort them into categories. Others, like IBM’s Watson use…